The luckiest horse in Reno

When the men approached, the black foal might have
been nursing. Or she might have been on her side, giving her wobbly
legs a rest, leaning into her mother under the starry desert sky.
At the sound of the vehicle, the band prepared to move and did move
at once, for horses are animals of prey and so their withers
twitched, their ears stiffened, their perfect, unshod hooves dug
into the scrub for traction and then they began to run. The black
foal might have taken a second or two longer than the others to
rise. Perhaps the mare, already upright, bolted instantly, turning
her head to see if the foal had followed. The headlights appeared
on a rise. The men were shouting and then there was another bright
light -- it trained from the roof of the vehicle across the sunken
bajada and it swept the sands, illuminating the wild and running
four-legged spirits as their legs stretched in full perfect
extension, flashing across their hides which were dun and paint and
bay, making a living mural in 3-D in which the American story --
all of it -- was frozen here forever, in the desert as it always
is, as bullets hissed from the vehicle through the patches of
juniper and into the wild horses of the old frontier. It was
Christmas. Two thousand years earlier, Christ had been born in a
stable.

Two months later on a cold and sunny
afternoon, a man was hiking in the mountains outside of
Reno. Something made him look to his left, up a hill. He saw a dark
foal lying down in the sagebrush, not able to get up. A bachelor
stallion had been watching from a distance and now came over and
nibbled at the foal's neck. She tried to get up but couldn't and
the stallion rejoined his little band. The hiker called for help. A
vet arrived and could find no injuries. As it grew dark, a trailer
was pulled across the washes and gulleys until it approached the
filly, about a hundred yards away and down hill. The stars were
particularly bright that night and helped the rescue party,
equipped only with flashlights, lumber across the sands and up the
rocky rise where the filly was down. Four men lifted her onto a
platform and carried her down the hill and into the trailer. "She
was a carcass with a winter coat," Betty Lee Kelly, a rescuer,
later told me. She was covered with ticks and parasites, weak and
anemic. She was six months old. Two days later, at a sanctuary near
Carson City called Wild Horse Spirit, Betty and her partner Bobbi
Royle helped her stand. But she kept falling. Over the weeks, they
nourished her and she grew strong and regained muscle and she began
to walk without falling down. But she was nervous, not skittish
like a lot of horses are, especially wild ones, but distracted,
preoccupied, perhaps even haunted. Because of her location when
rescued, which was near Lagomarsino Canyon, and because she was
starving, her rescuers reasoned that she had been a nursing foal
who had recently lost her mother. Without mother's milk, a foal can
last for a while in the wilderness, sometimes as long as a couple
of months. And because a band of bachelor stallions had been nearby
when she was found, her rescuers figured that they had taken her
in, looking after her until they could no more, standing guard as
she lay down in the brush to die. As it turned out, the filly was
the lone survivor of the Christmas massacre, and they called her
Bugz.

Bugz was a member of the
historic Virginia Range herd, the first mustangs in the country to
win legal protection (which they have since lost). Like the other
mustangs of the West, their history in this land runs deep, as DNA
has shown; they are direct descendants of the horses of the Ice
Age, which flourished in the West, crossed the Bering land bridge,
fanned out across the world, went extinct here and then returned
with conquistadors, quickly re-establishing themselves and
ultimately heading into the nether reaches of Nevada to be left
alone.

Several years ago, I drove out to the kill site
with Betty Kelly, to pay respects and see how it's changed since
the massacre. We climbed the rutted road leading into the Virginia
Range, parked and walked up a rise. It was spring time and the
stands of sage were puffy with rain and fragrant. Except for our
footsteps, it was quiet. The horse skulls and cages of ribs and
shins and intact hooves and manes and tails were still there,
forever preserved in the dry Mojave air. There was a pair of leg
bones, crossed, as if running in repose. Betty knew exactly which
horse this was, and had told me about her on our first visit to the
site. Of the 34 horses killed in the massacre, she was horse #1 in
the court record, or Hope, as she and Bobbi had named her after
being called to the scene on the day the bodies were discovered, as
they always are when mustangs are in need -- which is often.

Branded as pests that steal food from livestock or
renegades that range into town and destroy lawns, they have been
under siege for decades, enduring government round-ups and vicious
killings. The murders are rarely solved, although in the case of
the 1998 massacre, three men were arrested and one of them
ultimately pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge -- killing a horse
that another member of the trio had already shot to put it out of
its misery.

"She had probably been
here for a day or two," Betty recalled, and as she continued, it
was like a prayer. "She was lying in the sand. She had dug a small
hole with her front legs, intermittently trying to get up." I knew
the story well and in the bearing witness there was comfort and
then Betty's voice trailed off and we walked on. After awhile, we
came across the horse known in the Nevada court system as #4. Like
the others, Bobby and Betty gave him a name. It was Alvin. He was
the one who was shot in the chest and whose eye was mutilated with
a fire extinguisher. His carcass -- the barrel of his chest -- was
picked and blown clean by time, wind, and critters, rooted always
in the great wide open.

As I walked the site this time, I
saw that someone or something, maybe a coyote or perhaps the
weather, had moved a few of the large stones in the cross under a
juniper tree that Betty had made on the one-year anniversary. But
it was still very much a cross. And then I discovered something
new: an empty box of Winchester cartridges, lodged between the
branches of another tree. Winchester -- the gun that won the West,
the ammo that brought it to its knees -- now back as a reminder,
probably placed intentionally and maybe by the people who killed
the horses. Did someone have us in their sights? I wondered as I
looked across the range. "I think it's time to go," I said, but as
we walked back to the pick-up, there came a wonderful sight -- a
few horses, down from a rise. Since the massacre, Betty rarely saw
them in the canyon, and she had visited it several times a year, as
a kind of a groundskeeper for the cemetery. On my visits, I had not
seen any horses either, nor had I seen any hoofprints, which made
me think that they had been avoiding the area because in the
desert, tracks last for a very long time.

The horses that
approached were brown with black manes -- the scruffy and beautiful
Nevada horses that nobody asks for at the adoption centers. We
stopped in our tracks and watched them and they watched us back.
After awhile, we bid them farewell. As we headed down the mountain,
I turned for one more look. They were walking across the boneyard
towards the stone cross, reclaiming their home.

Deanne Stillman's beat is the desert, and her previous
book is the bestselling Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder,
Marines, and the Mojave. This piece is excerpted from Mustang: The
Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, just published by
Houghton Mifflin.

More from Wildlife

How can anyone do that? The strongest
argument against the existence of God is the continued existence of
the human race!

Anonymous

Jun 16, 2008 12:17 PM

No one under ANY circumstances should do this type of
thing. If they are caught, they should be shot and left
to die in the desert.

Anonymous

Jun 17, 2008 05:01 PM

Yet another reason to not eat beef. Most people have
no idea about the far reaching effects that the livestock industry
has on native wildlife. Wolves, coyotes, prairie
dogs, bears, mountain lions, bison, eagles, condors and
wild horses are killed (legally and illegally) because
they "infringed" on lands grazed by livestock.
And most of that land is public land leased to cattle
ranchers. Something to think about the next time
you order a hamburger.

Ranchers and wild horses

Kym

Oct 07, 2008 04:11 PM

The number of cattle grazed on public lands is a very small percentage of the beef industry, somewhere in the 2-4% range. The vast majority of beef is raised on private lands. So the reson to not eat beef because it decreases the wild horses on public land is really not a valid one.

I don't get this whole "ranchers are against wild horses" accusation. The ranchers I know like wild horses, especially if they have some as ranch horses. Before the wild horse act, ranchers maintained and/or encouraged wild horses to roam their lands. They provided an excelent resorce from which to obtain great ranch horses.

Plus, people who own horses and cattle know the land is healthier when you graze both species on it, as it will get "horse sick" or the other way around if just one species grazes from it. In managing their property they will find the horses graze the parts the cattle don't and visa versa, the parasite load is reduced between the two species. True, you do need to maintain an equalibium between the cattle, horse, and wildlife populations, otherwise you get overgrazing, but the land is healthier if you include horses with the cattle.
And many ranchers are also hunters, hunters understand maintaining a good husbandry of the lands in favor of the environment, as no habitat, no aniamls.

Yes, there are a few ranchers who don't like the wild horses, but they are the minority. Though it seems those are the sorces that mustang rights advocates use as examples of the typical rancher.

Anonymous

Jun 18, 2008 02:30 PM

Please do not anthropomorphize horses unless
you are ready to be consistent and to provide this labeling for the
other animals (particularly native species) which have to compete
with the late arrivals, the non-native species: the horse.

As for stock, they should never be
allowed to feed on public land, especially at sweetheart rates for
ranchers. And, ranchers should be charged full reparation
fees for the damage their stock causes.

As for the killing, we need heavier patrols and the
eventual relocation of horses from the places where their
non-native presence competes with native species.

The Majestic Horses

Kathy

Jul 27, 2008 03:34 PM

Only cowards slim around at night, with guns shooting defenseless animals. Since this story has told us the pedigree of these Majestic Horses we already know their heritage & breeding was 100% better & their lives worth much more than the cowards that murdered them. I pray one day these cowards run into some real men, I pray they come face to face with ALF members.

Wild Horses

Vicky

Jul 29, 2008 10:19 AM

Just when I think my heart can't break anymore I read stories of human atrocities. Poor wild horses never bother a soul and yet they, too, are terrorized and killed! I am so happy the little foal was saved. There is sometimes a happy ending.